The
Bishop of the Episcopal Church in San Francisco, Marc Andrus, has issued an
outrageous statement "welcoming" the new Catholic Archbishop of San
Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, who will be installed on Thursday, October 4.
In the process of saying "how do you do", the Episcopalian church
leader insults Cordileone over his stance in support of marriage. Imagine that.
The Episcopal leader also extends the hand of welcome to Catholics who may not
like Cordileone to come home from Rome. It wouldn't exactly be charitable to
reply, "Don't let the church door hit you on the way out", so I don't
expect Archbishop Cordileone to say what many of the rest of us would be
tempted to say. Meanwhile, it's the Episcopal church that continues to hemorrhage
members. I can't help but think it must, ironically, have something to do with
the church's leaders' wrongheaded understanding of inclusivity. In any event, Archbishop
Cordileone must publicly be criticized before his installation by his
Episcopalian neighbor because the former had the courage to say, following the
teaching of Jesus Christ, that "a man shall leave his father and mother
and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh". I'll let pass
the opportunity to gloss the text with lengthy commentary about the origin of
Anglicanism in the deeds of a monarch who also had trouble, in another direction, grasping the meaning
of that same text.
"Is
this a church ... or ...?", Mr Roper, in his Lutheran phase, might
unecumenically ask of Bishop Marc.